Authors: Hammond Innes
There was no Decca Navigator on board.
North Star
was not a ship. It was not equipped to ride the seas unanchored and alone, and once we lost sight of Foula the rate of drift was largely guesswork. I did some rough calculations, knowing there could be only one answer – total disaster. The rate of drift affected the time, the wind direction the place, but nothing could stop us hitting the rock-bound coast of Shetland – except possibly the speed and direction of the tidal flow.
Smit’s view was the same as mine now – evacuate to the derrick floor and submerge to maximum depth. It was the only way to slow the rate of drift, to give us more time. Tugs were gathering, but even if any of them could have got out to us, there was no hope of fixing a towline. But when we reported to Villiers, who was lying stretched out in his bunk, it seemed impossible to make him understand the gravity of the situation. I thought at first he was thinking of the damage to the rig, the difficulty of raising finance, all the problems he would have to face when, and if, he ever got ashore. But it was more than that. He had withdrawn inside himself. In the heat of the cabin, in the warm security of his bunk, he had reached the point where he felt that if he ignored it all the storm would go away.
But even down there, in the depths of the quarters, it was impossible to ignore what was happening outside. The howl of the wind overlaid the sound of the power plant, the crash of the seas pounding at the steel columns of the rig shook the
whole structure, the noise of it so loud we had to shout.
Finally he said, ‘All right, Hans. Do what you like. You’re the barge engineer. It’s your responsibility.’
Hans shook his head, looking bewildered and scared. ‘My responsibility, ja. But vith you on board it is impossible that I tell the men to leave their quarters and go up into the vind. They vill not accept it from me.’
Villiers didn’t say anything. He just lay there, his eyes closed.
‘You must tell them,’ Hans said. ‘To go out into the vind is like going over the top into battle. And the ballast control engineer, who vill have to leave after he has flooded the torpedo tanks, vill be lucky if he is not killed. They vill do it for you, but not for me – not vith you ’ere on board.’
Villiers didn’t answer.
Time was passing, and we had no time. I ripped the blankets off him and yanked him out of the bunk. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘For God’s sake tell them, now.’
He stood there in his underpants looking vague. ‘We’re more than twenty miles from the coast,’ he muttered.
‘Seventeen,’ I said. ‘Nearer sixteen now.’
‘It’s not necessary.’
‘I’m telling you it is.’
But he shook his head, unwilling to accept it.
I grabbed hold of him then. ‘Why the hell did you bring me on board if you don’t accept what I’m telling you? I need you to advise me, you said. Somebody to take charge in an emergency. All right. The emergency is now and I am advising you. Get the men up to the derrick floor and submerge to depth.’
He stared at me, his eyes blank. And suddenly I knew what it was. He was a financier, not a leader. He could read a balance sheet at a glance, could figure out assets and financial gain like a computer, he could talk a board of directors into submission by the cold logic of figures – but he was no bloody good with men. Last night, telling them about the storm to come, it had
been facts and figures, not the reality of a hurricane blast and huge seas. Now, with the prospect of death a cold, terrible battering, he was opting out.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘You got me on board and my life’s at risk. Get dressed now and come to the messroom. I’ll do the talking, but you’ll be there, and you’ll go with them up to the derrick floor. You understand?’
He nodded, accepting it slowly. ‘Yes. Yes, of course.’ And he began to dress. It was incredible, under orders the blankness had left his eyes.
I told Hans to get every single man on board into the messroom. As an outsider, with Villiers standing there, I thought I could do it. And I did. It was, in fact, easier than I had expected. They weren’t seamen, but most of them had lived with the sea long enough to understand its power, and they weren’t fools. They could hear the wind, feel the seas thundering against the base of the structure. They were ready for action.
It took almost an hour to get them all up to the derrick floor, with their lifejackets on and the rig submerged to depth. Hans stayed with the ballast control engineer, insisting that it was his duty. It meant two lives at risk instead of one, but they both made it, though they were caught by a wave on the catwalk above the pipe deck and Hans was swept against a crane and badly bruised.
In that hour, before the rig was down to maximum depth, the galley staff had managed to get food and drink up to the derrick floor, Lennie had collected his first aid kit, and blankets, clothes, bedding, the welders had got their equipment up. Every department had thought for themselves and brought whatever they considered necessary. The divers had even dragged their inflatable up. And in that wind it was remarkable that they achieved so much without loss of life, for the work went on after the ballast tanks had started to flood.
In the end, of course, the quarters were left deserted and Sparks closed the radio room. After that we had no means of
communicating with the outside world. But somebody had brought a portable up and we huddled round it, listening to the one o’clock news describing the build-up of tugs and ships and aircraft, all waiting to get out to us as soon as the storm had passed. The wind was westerly now. I don’t know what the force was. High up on that platform, I felt it was beyond anything I had ever experienced. The forecast had not been specific – hurricane force winds with speeds over 100 knots. The depression had now deepened to a shattering 938 millibars; worse still, its rate of movement had slowed and it was not expected to clear the north of Shetland before midnight.
The derrick floor, normally a demoniac centre of activity with drawworks roaring, winches screaming, the clatter of tongs and the turntable turning, was now still and packed with men. But not silent. There was more noise on that platform than ever there had been when
North Star
was drilling, the wind roaring through it, howling at the doors, banging and slamming at the corrugated iron shelter sheets, tearing them loose, whirling them away. And below us, the pipe deck, even the helicopter deck, a welter of foam as the combers roared and broke aboard.
The toolpusher’s office was the first to go, the sea breaking it into matchwood, the wind picking it up and hurling bits of it past our refuge. Pipe, and great lengths of casing, were swirled back and forth till the guardrails were torn out of the steel deckplates and they went over the side. The catwalk was buckled and curled up like the slide in a giant child’s playground. And all the time we worked to keep large pieces of equipment from breaking loose, to shore up and fasten the flapping shield of iron sheet that was all the protection we had. Everything chaos, and the thuds of the waves thundering beneath the rig, crashing against it, could be felt through our bodies, the movement sickening. The half-submerged rig had a dead feeling. It was like a rock awash.
One of the roustabouts, a man called Wally, was the first to sight land. That was shortly after two o’clock and he only
caught a fleeting glimpse of it. I didn’t doubt him, because it was downwind of us, just where it should be, and he said it was low-lying. The wind was still westerly by the handbearing compass I had brought with me, and on my calculations, we would go ashore on the West Burra coast, possibly just south of it. I thought perhaps it was Havras Island he had seen, and I wished Johan was with us. He would have known, because the Havras marked the entrance to Clift Sound and the
Duchess
’s home voe of Taing. But, in fact, it must have been St Ninian’s Isle.
That brief sighting, the knowledge that we were so near to disaster, finally decided me on a desperate course of action – something I had wanted to do, but had not dared for fear it would kill us all. I looked at Hans, leaning over my shoulder staring at the chart and helping me to hold it flat on the oil-scummed floor. ‘The tide turns in just over an hour,’ I said, and he nodded, knowing what was in my mind. I knew what he was thinking, too – if only we had that spare anchor, if only we could use it now, now that we were in shallower water. It could have held us till the tide turned.
But then, of course, we could never have got it over the side. There was no electric power, and anyway, the crane nearest to No. 4 winch had already been forced off its mountings, the jib leaning at a drunken angle and banging to and fro. I got up and lurched across to Villiers, who was working with a gang of men to shore up the sides of the driller’s office. I told him what I wanted, and he nodded, cheerful and seeming almost to be enjoying himself. ‘Okay. Go ahead.’ And he turned and continued with his work, seemingly indifferent to the risk and the ultimate cost if we survived.
It seemed an age that the two welders were hanging in their chairs, held by ropes as they worked with their torches to cut through the windward legs of the derrick. They cut them one at a time, and as they worked on the second, the rig was slowly turning. There was a moment when I was sure I had made a terrible error of judgment and that the whole hundred-
odd feet of steel would collapse on top of us. Standing there, watching them, I could see in my mind the ghastly result as the weight of the crown wheel crashed down on to the packed group of men around me.
But the rig kept turning, and suddenly there was a rending sound. Somebody screamed a warning. A rope flew and one of the welders swung across our heads, his torch still burning, to be brought up short by the oxygen hose, and looking up, I watched incredulously as the whole Eiffel Tower structure trembled and began to move, the crown wheel and the traveller swinging dizzily across the scudding clouds. The scream of steel on steel, the whip-crack of metal breaking. And then it was gone, just like that. I don’t think any of us really saw it go. One minute it was there, the next there was nothing over our heads.
The tide must have turned about the time the derrick went over the side. And I think the absence of it may have made all the difference, for in that force of wind, the air almost solid with the power of it, the derrick must have been acting as a great sail. At any rate, just over an hour later, we began to hear a deep thunderous noise like an artillery barrage. This gradually got louder until it was an appalling, shattering sound. Visibility was poor, rain and spray screaming past us, so that we seemed almost into the backwash surf of the wave breaks before we saw the land. The roar of sound was so great then that we were just standing there aghast, holding on to whatever we were clinging to, frozen into stillness. And then, downwind of us, through the torn and battered iron sheets, there was a darkening of the waterlogged air, a great mass looming up out of the maelstrom of broken water.
Ever since the barrage of sound had started, Hans and I had guessed what it was – the Atlantic hurricane waves pounding at the near-1,000 foot cliffs of Fitful Head. We both of us knew what that could mean, but now that we could all of us see the towering mass itself, I do not think there was a man among us who did not believe his last hour had come. But
though it seemed so near, we were still out beyond the 10 fathom line, and the cliffs were moving, sliding past, the rig being carried south-east by the tide at almost 3 knots. Soon we could see the headland of Siggar Ness, and when the tide swept us past it, there was open sea, wind and tide with us, both carrying us south-east towards Horse Island and the Sumburgh Roost.
It was almost dark then, and as night fell, nothing to see in the pitch black fury, all our senses were in our ears and in the feel of the rig under our feet. I don’t know when we hit the Roost. The rig was like a half-submerged wreck and there was such a pandemonium of breaking waves and crashing gear that it was impossible to tell whether the chaos was the effect of the race or shallows. But I didn’t care. We were in the clear, and so long as the pontoons did not strike a reef, I was sure a structure as massive as a rig would survive it. And then, suddenly, Sumburgh light came clear of the land, its revolving beam haloed in the wind-driven spray.
The light bore roughly 20°, and within a very short time it was due north of us. I knew then that we were in the grip of the great tidal race that streams round the southern tip of Shetland. I remembered reading all about it in the Pilot, and on the
Mary Jane
I had found an old Admiralty tide book:
Ships in it frequently become unmanageable
,
and sometimes founder
. Those words had undoubtedly been written with the fishing boats in mind, but the statement:
It should be given a wide berth
was as applicable now as then.
When we entered the race the tidal flow was with the wind, so that we were moving eastward at a considerable speed. But the Pilot, which I had brought with me from the barge engineer’s office, warned that in the Roost the tide only ran eastward for about three hours. There was then a ‘still’ of about half an hour, after which the tidal flow was westward for 9 hours. Thus, we had only a short period of the eastward thrust left. The ‘still’ came and there was less sea, the light on
Sumburgh head blurred and almost stationary, bearing roughly 350°.
That night I was convinced the rig would break up. Shortly after midnight there was a terrible rending of metal, the whole structure shaking to a series of power-hammer thuds. The mud tanks had broken adrift. They went on rumbling and crashing hour after hour as we lay huddled together for warmth, our bodies soaked and shivering with cold. It was a terrible night, and the pounding went on and on.
They finally smashed a way through and went over the side shortly after four. It suddenly seemed almost quiet. The seas were lessening, too, and Sumburgh Light bore north-east. We were out of the Roost.
An hour later we were back in it again. The tide had turned and was carrying us eastward. No rain now, and with visibility much improved, we could check our progress by the bearing of the light. In the space of just over one hour it moved from north-east through north to almost north-west. That was when we were finally spewed out of the Roost by the eastward flow and came under the lee of the land. The wind died away, and the sea with it.